i want to be your eclipse
by inbetweenbreaths
Summary: Collection of Alex/Piper drabbles, canon compliant, mostly angst.
1. free fall

Sometimes I start feeling poetic and write short drabbles in between working on longer fic chapters, so I figured I'd start posting them here.

Alex's POV about the breakup & the concept of free falling through life.

* * *

No matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise, Alex eventually learned that free fall wasn't fearless.

She always told herself she chose it. That stepping over the edge was a deliberate act of courage, her way of spitting in the face of a universe that wouldn't stop fucking her over. But the thing was, she'd aways had a weak foothold. Slowly, so slowly at first that Alex barely noticed, the ledge she was standing on began to crumble.

There was a close call in Jakarta, where one of her mules almost missed a huge delivery; she worked overtime for two weeks just to tie up the loose ends. There were missed phone calls, canceled dinner plans, perfunctory kisses. Some nights Piper's voice was an echo rebounding between two pairs of pained expressions, the questions reaching Alex long moments after they left her girlfriend's mouth.

She never seemed to have the right answer for them, and that scared her. At night she held Piper tightly, replaying their last conversation while tracing fingertips over her girlfriend's skin as if she could write a better script on the contours of her body.

 _'Alex, I miss you.'_

 _'Pipes, I'm right here.'_

But while the words were true in the ink-dark honesty of night, they never quite held up the next morning. Alex would wake early and slip out of bed to check her messages while Piper slept on, bedsheets balled up in her fists.

Their life become a splintering of fault lines, the space between them widening like a rift in the landscape. Eventually the ground split open, the resultant chasm swallowing everything whole.

Alex hadn't known until then what _real_ free fall felt like—the way it sucked the breath from her lungs, whipped her skin raw, made her eyes sting. The downward motion required a certain reckless abandon, a conviction that there was nothing left to lose because she'd already lost everything. What was she supposed to do, except lean into her own momentum? Constant velocity, that was the key. A heavy heart turning her into dead weight, dropping her faster than the ghosts she was running from.

She continued to travel. At that speed every city looked distorted, and Alex started using smack to further erase the shapes of their skylines. All she wanted to see was the universe shattering above her, so she could look for beauty inside the collapse of it.

 _"You are a drug dealer,"_ Piper once told her, _"and it's ruining everything good in your life."_ But it wasn't the drugs; it was the whole broken world, and the void that got left when the dust settled.

Of course Alex ended up at the bottom; it's what happens when the girl you love twirls you to the edge and then shoves you over. It's what happens when everyone you tried to make a home inside of just leaves, and all that remains is a cracked foundation.

Alex never chose free fall. It was created by the absence of better things- by the death of her mother, by Piper leaving, by a world that offering nothing but emptiness to fill her outstretched hands with.


	2. systematic erasure

Alex's POV on naming Piper in her testimony

* * *

 _Eight to ten years._ That's what the lawyer told her. Eight to ten years in prison, unless she agreed to give the feds a list of names. Taking that plea deal was one of the easiest decisions she'd ever made- right up until it wasn't.

"Was there anyone else?" the lawyer asked.

"I'm thinking," Alex muttered.

It had been eight years since the breakup in Paris, and her ex barely even seemed like a person anymore. She was just an icy feeling, the ache of an old injury. Alex had replaced the touch of her hands with tourniquet and needle, the sound of her laughter with music pumping through club speakers. She'd done everything she could to make Piper disappear, but some ghosts just won't go quietly.

Where did she live, in the memory of Piper Chapman?

She imagined Piper systematically erasing her, the cognitive version of burning your ex's things after a breakup. Shoving memories onto the fire as if they were photographs; erasing those nights in the South Pacific they spent lying together in hammocks and cool sand, the afternoons passed holding hands in flea markets, the midnight festivals in Amsterdam, the hotel rooms filled with laughter.

Alex pictured all those shared memories catching fire, indiscriminately charred and blackened. She had spent years sifting through the wreckage, trying to salvage something of herself from the ashes. But Piper had just chalked it up to a lost cause and left, never looking back.

Well, fuck her.

 _Fuck her_ for her walking away with her hands clean while Alex stood clutching the embers; for thinking she'd never have to look back and face the ruin. Now it was Alex's turn to choose the ending, and this time she'd make damn sure Piper felt it.

"Piper Chapman," she said, hoarsely. It had been so long since she'd spoken the name. It tasted like smoke and honey. Like ruin and sweetness. "Piper Chapman was part of the ring."

When it was over and her deposition was recorded, Alex didn't allow herself to regret saying it. Revenge was the only salve she had left, and she just wanted the burns to stop hurting.


	3. no light, no light

Early season 1, Alex's POV, more angst (I swear someday I'll write fluff...)

* * *

Being around Piper had always felt like chasing sunlight. Alex would imagine herself standing in an open field, the afternoon glow all languid and golden, her eyes closed and arms stretched expectantly toward its warmth.

She didn't realize, until the moment the heat touched her skin, that it would burn like a live wire; that she was a lightening rod inviting in a storm. Forces of nature are rarely gentle, and Piper was a solar flare waiting to happen.

There was a trick Alex learned as a kid— how to stare at something bright until your retinas memorize the shape of it, the image still glowing convincingly even after you close your eyes. That's how it was after Piper left. Her dissipating light burned itself permanently into Alex's vision. At night the photo reel behind Alex's eyelids kept replaying the last glimpse of her, the image of her sad smile shining with only half its usual wattage. Alex never thought Piper would turn the lights off on her way out of the hotel room; never thought she'd run away with the sun and leave nothing behind but a box of broken lightbulbs.

After the arrest, during her trial, Alex poured gasoline on Piper's name and struck a match to it. That's what you're supposed to do, when somebody hurts you. You're _supposed_ to hate them; you're supposed to hurt them back.

But when they got to prison the strategy backfired. Each time Alex entered a room Piper would pointedly walk out of it, and every repetition of her exit looked exactly like it had in Paris. Alex kept herself awake at night trying to prevent the memory from projecting itself onto the canvass of her nightmares, but seeing Piper walk out in real time was somehow even worse. It was like watching the sun set over and over again, an infinite time loop of bad endings.

 _"You stole my life,"_ Piper told her. _"My good life, that I made after you."_

But all Alex could think about was the brokenness she got stuck with. How her heart became a gallery of lamps she couldn't figure out how to light; a glass mosaic of useless, shattered bulbs, each one of them a mirror but none with enough shine left to show an accurate reflection.

So who stole who's life, really? The girl who walked off with the sun, or the one slowly fading in the absence of starlight?

And maybe, if Piper wouldn't share the sunshine, Alex would just have to eclipse her.

 _"I never forgave you for leaving,_ " she said, _"because you broke my fucking heart."_

What she meant was, _I want you to know what this feels like._ How cold you have to be, to feed the furnace in your chest and feel the heat go nowhere; to pour the gasoline and light the match and just go right on shivering.

But when she finally looked into Piper's eyes again, she realized that the light she'd been so jealous of was missing. There was nothing but a look of faint, shadowed hurt, closely resembling the kind Alex had lost herself inside of. Seeing it there didn't make Alex feel better. Really, it just made her feel sad.

She wanted to reach out and take Piper's hand, so they could find what they'd misplaced in Paris: the light lying dormant right where they left it, sheltered inside the wreckage of their long-lost smiles.


End file.
